Gleaning and Communications VISTA - AmeriCorps

The Farm to Full Bellies is a project that rescues food from small local area farms through a gleaning process. The goal is to harvest still-useable food that would otherwise go to waste due to the farmer's inability to process and sell the food because of over-planting, what was dropped during harvesting, labor shortages, financial viability, or other issues. With the use of volunteers mostly, as well as some staff, this program works with 26 partner farms to arrange for the donation and gleaning of crops, and transporting it back to the ECP Food Bank warehouse where we clean and package the food to be given away at the onsite food bank, through delivery, and our various other service methods. The ECP Food Bank currently serves 60,000 people per month and this food gleaned and donated helps us ensure that no one is turned away that needs food. The farmers we work with are part of the BIPOC community and grow specialty crops, we can use this food to serve our 70% BIPOC client base. The main objective of this program is to decrease food waste in the food system while being able to provide more healthy food to the people who need it most. In this position, MADF partners with Harvest Against Hunger (HAH), a program incubator and catalyst utilizing a team of AmeriCorps members in the Harvest VISTA program who build sustainable, community food security programs. These range from gleaning projects to regional food security assessments, to expanding community-run gardens and food bank farms. AmeriCorps members serve with their projects for a year: recruiting and coordinating volunteers, addressing challenges and management related to food supply chain, creating systems to collect data and evaluate programs, and growing organizations through storytelling, development, and fundraising. They benefit from professional development and team building in a nationwide cohort. HAH and the Harvest VISTA Program aims to involve the larger community in addressing food insecurity.

In this position, the AmeriCorps member will recruit new longer-term volunteers to help with gleaning efforts, build relationships with local area farmers through existing partnerships, form new partnerships, and coordinate gleaning/food rescue opportunities with partner farms. The AmeriCorps member will also strengthen recruitment strategies, sustain systems for community-based volunteer engagement, collect data for program activities, and create communications materials.